One of the most effective channels of disseminating and obtaining information is through direct, personal relationships referred to as social networks. A social network consists of individuals and their personal relationships to other individuals through which social information and opportunities are exchanged. The direct, personal relationship implies that two people “know” each other and typically have a certain amount of trust for each other. The value of social networks can be demonstrated for example by the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon, which means that the distance between any two individuals in terms of direct personal relationships is relatively small (e.g., 6 degrees or less). Social networks are frequently employed by individuals often without conscious thought. For example, a person may be searching for a job and contact his or her friends to determine if they are aware of available positions. These friends are able to provide reliable information about positions they themselves directly know about. Additionally, these friends can recommend their job-seeking friend for available positions, assuming they consider the job-seeking friend to be qualified, reliable, hard working and the like. Furthermore, these direct personal relationships can be employed to obtain social information and/or opportunities such as for example information about possible romantic partners, good movies, restaurants, buying, selling, buying or trading of items and services, recommendations for movies, restaurants, romantic partners and the like.
Direct personal relationships are particularly useful in obtaining information and opportunities because of the associated reliability of information and individuals involved. For example, an individual typically is more often willing to swap a vacation home (house-swap) with a friend of a friend, even though the individual may not personally know the friend of a friend, than to house-swap with a stranger. A basis for such trust is that the individual can trust that their immediate friend would not be associated with the person offering to house-swap (e.g., friend of the friend) were the friend of a friend not reliable or trustworthy. (Or, more generally, the immediate friend can be trusted to offer an honest assessment of the trustworthiness of the third party.) Social networks are often relied upon for opinion based information such as for example, movies, restaurants, travel locations and the like. Such information within a large number of the general populous is typically more relied on than well known restaurant and movie critics.
However valuable social networks are, they can be extremely difficult to utilize in that it can be time consuming for an individual to contact every person they have a relationship with when searching for information. Moreover, even if an individual could make the searching task easier for themselves, e.g. by creating a massive mailing list of their friends, addressing everyone in that list for each question is highly antisocial and certainly unsustainable as a collective behavior, i.e. if everyone does it. In general, such type of manual searching through a social network is impracticable for most individuals due in large part to the relative size of the individual's social network, time constraints, taxing of respective relationships within the social network (e.g., frequent requests for information can have a negative impact on a relationship), etc.
A number of approaches have been conventionally employed to obtain social opportunities and information from social networks. One approach that can be used is for a person to email everyone he or she knows (e.g., buddies) requesting information on a particular subject. This approach is not likely to be appreciated by individuals on the receiving end of the email, particularly if such approach is employed often; and could possibly damage personal relationships.
Another technique to utilizing social information from social networks is to have individuals create a “home page” about themselves in which they describe particular attributes by which they want to be referred to, such as place of birth, high-school attended, occupation, areas of expertise, interests, hobbies, plans for the summer and the like. These pages can be associated with a search engine—then, in response to a person with certain attributes, the requested information, possibly including contact information, is returned. This approach fails for a number of reasons. Referrals often rely on information that individuals do not wish to be make publicly searchable. For example, typically individuals prefer not to have strangers and telemarketers be able to determine what their friends know about them, such as their hobbies and favorite vacation spots. Additionally, people identified through such a search can be strangers and unreliable. For example, a search for someone to carpool with may return an individual with a matching work schedule, but that individual could be difficult to get along with.
Thus, social networks and their direct personal relationships include a tremendous amount of latent information and opportunities. However, conventional approaches for discovering these latent features fail to properly utilize social networks in that they:                i) overtax personal relationships and cause information overload; and/or        ii) are inadequate for maintaining a sufficient level of individual privacy.        